View full sizePortland NAACP President Audrey Terrell's leadership and spending practices have come under the scrutiny of the NAACP's regional overseers.Amelia Templeton/Oregon Public Broadcasting

Time changes things, and with it the public profile
of Portland's seminal chapter of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People. The sharpest voice of advocacy this year came not from the
NAACP but the Portland African American Leadership Forum in its opposition to the
arrival of a Trader Joe's store in North Portland. For decades, the Urban
League of Portland rose to the forefront in advocating equality in education,
employment and economic security for African Americans and others in Oregon. Portland's
NAACP, if not quite moribund, has lost prominence despite its century-long
fight against discrimination in Oregon schools and housing.

Now it's back in the headlines – but for the wrong
reasons. Its president, Audrey Terrell, baked a plan to celebrate the chapter's
centennial with a gala fund-raising affair at the Oregon Convention Center and
inviting President Obama to speak.

There's nothing wrong with thinking big. What a plum
it would be to have Obama correctly cite the Portland chapter for becoming, in
the 1920s in Vernonia, one of the first in the nation to fight the U.S.
government over segregation. And to note, perhaps, that Portland's NAACP, the
oldest continuously chartered chapter west of the Mississippi River, is the
same outfit that helped African American soldiers returning from World War II
to gain work cards allowing their promotion. Who wouldn't want to pay $100 a
ticket to join the celebration and believe a hefty chunk of the charge would further
good work?

But Terrell drained $1,000 from the outfit's bank
account to reserve the ballroom at the OCC, leaving $2 as a balance, without a
formal vote that some board members say was required, and despite the fact that some
of the funds were reserved for a youth program. The Oregonian's Laura Gunderson
last week reported that some board members said Terrell made financial transactions without the
oversight of the organization's treasurer, whom at one point she had briefly removed
from office. Meanwhile, Terrell had placed in charge of the gala fundraiser her
hand-picked vice president, a Portland businessman who owed the state more than
$66,000 in fines for violating workers compensation and mortgage lending laws. And
that's to say nothing of the other
vice president Terrell had brought on board, but then let go for a time, a man
who'd spent three years at the Oregon State Penitentiary on rape and sodomy
convictions.

Every organization has its dirty laundry. The Urban
League withstood financial questioning that forced the ouster of its CEO in
1999 and forced another to step down in 2011. By comparison, Terrell seems a
bit player.

What's galling about Terrell's brief tenure,
however, is the apparent hubris with which she attempts to revive Portland's
NAACP. Arriving from Michigan about two years ago, the woman who says she was a
United Automobile Workers executive was dismissive in telling Gunderson: "The
NAACP here had been just so dormant .... What they've done in the past has been
really, really junky."

Here's what "junky" looks like: Terrell is
identified on the NAACP's website as Dr. Audrey Terrell – a false claim. She
has not completed her doctoral work at the California State Institute of
Integral Studies. Terrell left behind, in Michigan, $34,000 in federal tax
liens against her – a problem she described to Gunderson as her "bugaboo" while
allowing, separately, she had not filed her 2013 income taxes by April 15 but
enjoys several "lucrative" pensions from her previous employment. "Junky" also
means saying: "People I'm working with here in Portland are in a Portland box.
I bring a different mindset. You can't go to the Holiday Inn and have the
President speak."

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If you have questions about the opinion section, contact Erik Lukens, editorial and commentary editor, at elukens@oregonian.comor 503-221-8142.

Actually, you could. Obama logged widely reported stays
at Holiday Inns in Auburn, New York and Accra, Ghana. Then again, following
Terrell's logic, why would Obama want to speak at all to such a loser outfit as
Portland's NAACP?

The work of the local chapter of the NAACP has been
too important to Portland and the region to suffer an imperiously driven dust-up
that does nothing to help advance the organization's first purposes as iterated
here, in Oregon.

Regional leaders of NAACP will investigate whether
Terrell broke any rules. Meanwhile, the Rev. Gill Ford, director of
administration of the NAACP's 1,700 chapters nationwide, told The Oregonian's
editorial board: "This is a challenge for every unit: Are you doing the work of
the NAACP? Are you inclusive in that work? And are you following the
organization's structure?"

We can't answer for Terrell, who was instructed by
her national leaders to decline the editorial board's request for comment. We
can only insist that the NAACP deal with this mess swiftly and robustly by
answering its own pertinent questions and, if it supports Terrell, making public
how and why.